Search Results

This chapter explores how churches are redefining the creation of sacred space to reflect stewardship of the earth. The stories in this chapter include the initial steps taken by La Capilla de Santa Maria, a congregation of Latino immigrants in Western North Carolina, to promote energy efficiency, build a cob oven, and create a green jobs training program, and the green addition built by Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. The stories highlight the work of Interfaith Power and Light, a grassroots organization that provides a religious response to global warming. The lessons reveal how energy efficiency and green building can promote financial sustainability and social and environmental justice. This chapter also shows how green building can serve as a model in local communities and permeate the life of the church, reflecting religious values and spaces that draw people of faith closer to God.

This chapter reveals how churches are transforming the ministry of disaster relief and rebuilding by integrating the environment into their efforts. Many churches and faith organizations are making the environment a priority as they respond to the increasing scale of natural disasters precipitated by climate change. The stories in this chapter along the Gulf Coast include the congregation of St. John Baptist Church, which integrated energy efficiency into their rebuilt church; a group of innovative churches called Sustainable Churches for South Louisiana; a program called Desire Street Ministries, which rebuilds churches and educates youth; and the Jericho Road Housing Initiative, which is spearheading energy-efficient, affordable housing. The lessons learned point to the power of hope from faith, the importance of coordinating sustainability among denominations, the potential for partnerships with secular environmental groups, and the long-term economic gains from investing in green building.

With more than 130,000 schools in the United States and 20 percent of the population of school age, green schools have large-scale environmental consequences and also provide numerous benefits supporting the educational mission of school districts. This chapter argues that understanding resistance and developing genuine employee support for organizational change is especially crucial for green building, because ideological disagreements on environmental protection and climate change can plague green building projects with politically charged debate. The chapter'a case study illustrates how reorganization of typically hierarchical organizational command structure into participatory flat teams affects the symbolic and interactional patterns within an organization.

The Introduction summarizes the topics covered in this book. This book examines recent shifts of building processes in reaction to concerns for environmental sustainability: what has been termed “green building.” Attention to environmental harms created by our built environment, and more important, investigations into ways to minimize those harms, has led to extensive research aimed at altering building practices, technological systems, and economic parameters. This book expands on these investigations and applies a social science view to consider how green buildings require a shift in our intellectual and cultural loyalties and a reexamination of the ways that buildings alter our sense of ourselves and our relationship to the environment around us—both natural and man-made.

The chapter asks a number of questions: what determines when and why a particular firm will enter an ecologically relevant industry? How does this differ for new firms vs. existing firms that already operate in another industry? And, what role do firms play in shaping the industry once they become part of it? The chapter addresses these questions by offering a theoretical explanation of the emergence and evolution of the green building supply industry that grew in tandem with the emergence of the green building construction industry following the introduction of the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standard in 1998. The chapter first outlines existing scholarly theories that could explain who would enter new industries—such as the green building industry—during their emergence. Finally, the chapter outlines how these theories bore out in the emergence of the green building industry.

Our aesthetic judgments in everyday life are often intertwined with moral judgments, such as personal appearance, condition of one's possessions, and environmental eyesores. We also make moral-aesthetic judgments on artifacts by considering how user-friendly artifacts and environments respond to the specific needs of the intended users with care, respect, and consideration through their sensuous surface and design features. Less obvious are the designed objects and environments that enrich the content of the users' experiences through sensitivity to their bodily engagement and the temporal dimension of the experience, typically embodied in green buildings, as well as gardens, the tea ceremony, food serving, and packaging in the Japanese tradition. These aesthetic manifestations of moral values indicate the significance of the aesthetic in everyday life in promoting a good life, and how sensitively and caringly designed environments and artifacts must be an essential ingredient of a good society.

The green building movement can be characterized as a market-based movement. This means that the movement aims to shift the market toward more sustainable construction. Unlike social movements that aim to change the state, research on market-based movements suggests that they rely both on “hot causes,” or motivating reasons for action to encourage participation, and “cool mobilization,” where actors form a relationship with the movement through collective experience. In this way, cool mobilization is a collective process that has less urgency than the “hot cause” but which creates communities with common values that shift the market. As of yet, there is little understanding of the mechanisms that create or sustain cool mobilization. This chapter states that the way to examine organizational coalescence is by looking at narratives used to describe the creation and the space of the buildings as cooly mobilizing market narratives.

The rapid market uptake of green building has transformed the design and construction industries. However, little attention has been given to how a green building project transforms the organizations for which the project was built. This chapter argues that green building projects are often a gateway or a gravitational assist that gives momentum to a broader, organization-wide definition and commitment to sustainability. Gravitational assist describes the transformation of organizational culture to include concern for holistic sustainability through place-based initiatives. This chapter establishes a definition for “organizational sustainability” and then explores the relationship between green building projects and broader environmental and social commitments. The chapter describes a systemic approach to sustainability through three types of actions, those concerning people, process, and place.

This chapter presents a continuum of building-level actions cities are taking in light of the political and economic constraints they face. It begins by explaining the continuum of building-efficiency standards cities are using as well as a continuum of action that runs from individual buildings to all buildings in a defined district. It examines two categories of standards: those for constructing new buildings and those for retrofitting existing buildings. The chapter also considers the question of who gets to occupy green buildings—with the reduced energy costs they make possible—highlighting how some cities are building green low-income housing using methods that are then taken statewide. Finally, it examines how cities, in collaboration with the private and nonprofit sectors, are serving as test beds for technical, financing, and equity greenovations that can be scaled for policy in larger political geographies and for private market participation.

This chapter discusses Singapore’s commitment to environmental sustainability. Following its independence in 1965, founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew set out to mold the country into a clean, orderly, and environmentally friendly city as part of a broader campaign to instill civic order. Today, the country is considered as one of the world’s greenest cities. Singapore increased its greenery cover from 36 percent in 1986 to 46 percent in 2007. Indeed, two of Singapore’s unique attractions are the Botanic Garden and the newly built Gardens by the Bay, a multimillion dollar indoor complex opened on reclaimed land near the city center—one of the most innovative botanical gardens anywhere. Also, the government mandated green building standards, and the country’s electronic road-pricing system—part of a series of policies to limit cars that also includes competitive auctions for the right to own a car—was one of the world’s earliest and most successful.

This chapter examines the dynamics of rebuilding in one of the most devastated neighborhoods in New Orleans, the Lower Ninth Ward, after Hurricane Katrina and how this area has become a laboratory for architectural experimentation. In particular, it looks at Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation, a private sector effort to rebuild homes and lives in the Lower Ninth Ward, and how it evolved as a powerful voice of neighborhood preservation and racial justice at a moment when it appeared that the Lower Ninth Ward would remain vacant due to the lack of investment and support from the city’s elite. It also considers the efforts of Make It Right supporters to defend black residents’ “right of return” and to encourage the use of green building technologies, and argues that this project and the individual homes it has constructed are charming manifestations of the new landscape of neoliberal urbanism where the right to affordable housing and flood protection is determined by market forces as well as individual access to technological/architectural remedies.

Green building design has emerged as a global force, with one green building standard reporting more than 3.5 billion square feet certified worldwide. Green buildings focus on reducing environmental impact through improved water storage, reducing environmental perturbation, and reducing energy usage. Although the environmental benefits of green building design are now well established, it is only more recently that the field has come to appreciate the health benefits of green building design. This chapter discusses the green building movement and the challenges and opportunities it represents, with lessons that can be learned and are generalizable to urban health scholarship and action worldwide.

This chapter focuses on the importance of encouraging college students to include environmental stewardship as part of their vocation. It points out that the protection of nature is a universal value, important to cultures and religions worldwide. Understanding and preserving our cultural and personal relationships with nature leads to happier, healthier, and more fulfilling lives. Students learn to better understand the natural world and feel a sense of responsibility to use nature wisely through outdoor fieldwork and service opportunities. Institutional support enables students to practice environmental stewardship at many levels, from natural habitat restoration to sustainable agriculture, energy conservation, and green building design. Through courses on and off-campus, as well as research and internship opportunities, students gain knowledge and practice in sustainable living. Incorporating good ecological citizenship into daily life at college makes it likely that environmental stewardship will become part of our student’s vocations in the future.

On a fall morning in 1980, Pitzer College freshman George Somogyi walked out of his dormitory, looked up, and froze in his tracks. In front of him was something incredible. An enormous mountain, over 10,000 feet tall, stretched up to the sky in the near distance. What made this sight so bizarre is that the mountain wasn’t there before. Somogyi had been at college for three months and had never laid his eyes on Mount Baldy, a five-million-year-old formation that stands just a few miles from this campus on the eastern edge of Los Angeles County, because it was shrouded in smog so thick that it obscured the view for months at a time. Air pollution is a problem well known to the people of Los Angeles. In the 1970s their city became an icon of urban air pollution, as photos of brown haze choking downtown LA circulated worldwide. The air was so hazardous that people were hospitalized by the thousands. Yet today the air around Los Angeles, while far from perfect, is markedly improved. The amount of smog has been sliced in half since the 1970s, even as the population has doubled in size. More impressive still, the amount of particulate pollution—the small dust particles that lodge deep in the lungs and are especially harmful to human health—has been reduced to one-fifth the levels experienced in 1955. How did a change of this magnitude come about? This physical transformation was precipitated by a political transformation, as the people of Los Angeles joined together and fought for new rules to clean up the air. Beginning in the 1940s, citizens demanded that city officials look into the causes of the problem, which were not obvious at the outset. Their efforts led to the creation of the Los Angeles Bureau of Smoke Control in 1945. Soon the movement spread throughout California, where in 1947 state legislators passed the Air Pollution Control Act—a full quarter century before national policymakers adopted similar legislation.

We might not live in a sustainable age, but we’re living in the age of sustainability. The movement has gained a level of prominence in recent years that is difficult to dispute. The scholarly fields associated with sustainability have expanded dramatically; new tools and methods have appeared that help define, measure, and assess sustainability; and a broad range of organizations and communities have embraced the principles of sustainable living. Sustainability, in fact, has gone from marginal ecological idea to mainstream movement in a surprisingly short amount of time. We now see sustainability publicized at the supermarket, on university campuses, at the aquarium, in corporate headquarters, in government ministries, and in countless other places. A growing number of universities, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and corporations in the Western world possess an “office of sustainability”— replete with sustainability plans and guidebooks—but none have an “office of green radicalism” or an “office of the status quo.” In a sense, this environmental discourse has won out over rival conceptions of humanity’s relationship to the natural world. This chapter is an attempt to sketch out the different ways in which sustainability has gained a foothold in contemporary society. It is not meant to suggest that our world is sustainable. On the contrary, many barriers and entrenched interests have kept our world rather unsustainable, and Mathis Wackernagel has even argued that, since the 1990s, we have exceeded the Earth’s capacity to sustain us; we are now living in a state of global overshoot. The goal here, rather, is to show the ways in which our society has constructively responded to our ecological crisis—to demonstrate the growth and elaboration of the sustainability movement and describe some of the successes it has achieved in counteracting our bad habits. As the philosophy of sustainability has developed, so too has it expanded its scope. If we recall from earlier chapters, the concept of sustainability began in the eighteenth century as a method of managing forests, and by the 1960s and 1970s it had become a reaction to industrialism and the trend toward ecological overshoot.